The Costs of Justice: How New Leaders Respond to Previous Rights Abuses

Introduction

Introduction What Is Transitional Justice and Why Should We Care? The dramatic end of the Cold War in the late 1980s marked a fascinating twist in the study of transitional justice, those responses to a former regime’s repressive acts following a change in political systems. First, the death of ideological bipolarity allowed for the creation of new norms and the strengthening of older but long-ignored ones with regard to justice. Countries emerging from dictatorships in the last period of the “third wave” were no longer so constrained in their internal decisions by the broader geopolitical factors that had dogged their predecessors. Second, the sheer scale of communism’s collapse led to an unprecedented number of states—more than two dozen—suddenly faced with accounting for decades of dictatorship . Third, the trajectories of these postcommunist states demonstrated the tentativeness of democratization, upon which transitional justice is ostensibly based. While some postcommunist states immediately lurched in the direction of free-market democracies, other nominally new democracies (that is, those where members of the old regime continued to rule, claiming to be on a new political trajectory) clamped down rather than let up on opposition, and still other states disintegrated into bloody regional and civil wars that further complicated any reckoning with the past. 1 This book, based largely on elite interviews and media analyses conducted in the four postcommunist countries of Poland, Serbia, Croatia, and Uzbekistan, draws on the experiences of a diverse group of states from one of the most monumental political transitions in recent history in order to explore a fundamental question: What determines how a (nominally) new regime will pursue transitional justice following a period of repression?This question is an important component of the broader democratization discourse . Yet at a time when the U.S. government spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to promote democratization and human rights accountability around the world, we know relatively little about how to shape the desired outcome. The American-backed trial of Saddam Hussein in 2005–2006, largely criticized as a miscarriage of justice and an inspiration for Sunni insurgents in Iraq, highlights the weight of this dilemma. The Saddam Hussein trial is also a reminder of the staying power of transitional justice. Scarcely a day passes before another story appears in the national press about commemorations for victims of injustice, a truth commission ’s newest findings, or the next ex-dictator standing trial. At a time of momentous international challenges, from global warming and pervasive hunger to terrorism and war, this attention is not frivolous, but rather a sign of the times. A glance at the U.S. State Department’s Web site is enough to realize that dialogue concerning transitional justice has reached a new level. The primary U.S. foreign policy body identifies among its human rights objectives the need to “promote the rule of law, seek accountability, and change cultures of impunity.”1 To back up these words, the Office of War Crimes Issues has been established to pressure states to ensure criminal justice for their worst offenders. The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security , in turn, offers bounties for war criminals.The U.S. government’s $5 million reward for the (recently captured) former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadžić, is equal to that paid for many terrorists on the very same site.2 Cynics might still question the determination of U.S. officials who profess to care about transitional justice, particularly given lingering questions concerning how and why it fits into the “national interest.”3 Yet official U.S. positions in this sphere are symptomatic of a more global phenomenon . The international community is increasingly speaking out on the need to address past abuses. While intergovernmental bodies have always been somewhat equivocal about the need for justice versus peace, the 2 | THE COSTS OF JUSTICE United Nations (UN) and the Intra-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in particular, have condemned impunity and begun to view domestic amnesties as inconsistent with international human rights norms and laws.4 The Cold War’s explosive end resulted in the first international tribunal since Nuremberg and Tokyo: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1993), which was quickly followed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994). Since then, the United Nations has taken an active role in establishing and supporting other criminal trials in East Timor (2000), Sierra Leone (2002...